Some States Are Still Locking Up Way Too Many People
(Bloomberg View) -- The incarceration rate fell again in 2016, to 450 state and federal prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents from 459 in 2015. That news, from the Prisoners in 2016 report published last week by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, marks the eighth straight year of declines. The Great (or Terrible) Incarceration Boom is continuing to recede.
Still, as you can see from the chart, it has yet to retrace all that much of the territory it traveled in the 1970s and 1980s. That big rise was driven initially by the sharp increase in crime that started in the 1960s, but incarceration rates kept going up even as crime rates began to fall in the 1990s. Now the national violent crime rate is back to where it was in the early 1970s and the property crime rate is at a level last seen in the mid-1960s, but the incarceration rate is still higher than it was in 1997.
This seeming over-imprisonment has of course become a much-discussed national issue in the past few years. Bipartisan efforts to do something about it seemed to have been put on hold when hard-liner Jeff Sessions became attorney general last year. Lately presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner has been trying to revive them, and last Thursday he and his father-in-law (and Sessions) met with a few criminal-justice-reform advocates at the White House.
But such national efforts are of limited import given that, in the U.S., crime and punishment is mostly a state and local affair. Of the 1.46 million sentenced prisoners in state and federal institutions in 2016, 1.29 million were in state custody. As Fordham University law professor John Pfaff described in his excellent book "Locked In," which I wrote about last year, it is local district attorneys and state lawmakers who drove the incarceration boom, so it's mainly up to them to end it.
California and New York have both seen major state and local reforms aimed at reducing incarceration, and have brought incarceration rates back to late-1980s/early-1990s levels. Texas has also implemented major reforms and seen a big drop in incarceration since 2000, but only after a spectacular rise in the 1990s. Florida and Pennsylvania have seen only recent and relatively modest declines. Overall, the states with the biggest percentage declines in incarceration rates have been:
Only 17 states have seen increases in incarceration rates since 2008, and 13 of those had below-the-national-average rates to begin with (the other four are Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma). Also, Pfaff points out that, from 2015 to 2016 at least, the downward trend seems to be becoming more uniform across the states. Still, the main thing that stands out in the data is how different states have been and remain in their approach to crime and punishment.
Here, for example, are the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates in 2016:
Here are the 10 states with the lowest rates (I've set both charts to the same scale to make it easier to see the difference):
Some of these disparities can be explained by differing crime rates. There's tons of violent crime in Louisiana, for example, and not much in Maine. But Rhode Island has a higher violent crime rate than Kentucky and a nearly identical property crime rate, while the violent crime rate is higher in Massachusetts than in both Kentucky and Georgia (its property crime rate is much lower, though). Clearly, different states have different approaches to criminal justice. And I while I certainly don't want to deny that locking people up can prevent them from committing crimes and deter others from doing so, the evidence so far indicates that the states that have cut back on incarceration have not noticeably suffered for it in terms of increased crime.
Meanwhile, they've surely gained from the incarceration reductions in other ways. I owe my initial interest in this topic to demographer and conservative thinker Nicholas Eberstadt's 2016 book, "Men Without Work," which, after examining potential explanation after potential explanation for the big, economic-growth-impairing drop in the male labor-force participation rate in the U.S., finally concluded:
A single variable -- having a criminal record -- is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.
Again, part of the reason more members of these groups have criminal records is that they're more likely to have committed crimes -- at least the kinds of crimes that get you thrown in jail. But the uniquely harsh and punitive nature of the U.S. criminal justice system compared with that of other developed nations has obviously played a role, and in many cases so have the biases built into that system. And while national attitudes on crime and punishment have been changing in recent years, the stubbornly harsh and punitive nature of some states' (and counties') criminal justice systems have so far limited the effects of this attitude change.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
The best way to get at the historical statistics I cite here is to go the BJS Corrections Statistical Analysis Tool and click on "Quick Tables."
Sentenced state and federal prisoners is the numerator in all the incarceration rates in this column and in the Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The report also includes the slightly larger all-prisoners numbers (that is, including those who haven't been sentenced yet). Local jail inmates are not included in the report except for in a few less-populous states where they're simply counted as part of the prison population.
Pennsylvania passed shrinking Illinois to take fifth place in according to the Census Bureau population estimates released last month.
I should note that labor markets are currently so tight that criminal records seem to have become less of a hurdle. In Dane County, Wisconsin, Ben Casselman wrote in the New York Times some manufacturers are even hiring people still in prison to work at full wages. But we can't really count on such conditions continuing indefinitely.
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